HPC YEARBOOK 2021/22
Cambridge-1 advances healthcare research in the UK
A new supercomputer dedicated to advancing healthcare research has been developed for UK research institutions, finds Robert Roe
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vidia recently introduced Cambridge-1, a $100 million investment that promises
to advance healthcare research partnerships across the UK. The UK’s most powerful
supercomputer, unveiled by CEO Jensen Huang, Cambridge-1 is designed to advance research at AstraZeneca, GSK, King’s College London, Oxford Nanopore, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The new system will help these research institutes to develop a better understanding of brain diseases like dementia, use AI to design new drugs and improve the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes. ‘We’ve seen an exponential growth in the amount of data, particularly healthcare data that is being collected due to the pandemic,’ said David Hogan, vice president for enterprise EMEA at Nvidia. ‘We started off working in radiology and medical imaging, and then progressed into areas such as genomics and with the advent of AI, we are working in the field of drug discovery, looking at the ability to
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identify targets and compounds, and more recently working with things like natural language processing, to be able to process and analyse both research and clinical data in order to be able to enhance the diagnostic process.’ ‘We’re at the beginning of the digital biology revolution, and to do this work scientists need a powerful rocket for their journey,’ said Huang. ‘Cambridge-1 brings together decades of our work in accelerated computing, AI and life sciences into a single computing centre.’ Cambridge-1 is named for the
birthplace of genomics, Huang explained during the virtual event. The UK city of Cambridge is also the site of Arm’s headquarters, which Nvidia agreed to acquire last year, and that Huang hopes to make Nvidia’s ‘future home in the UK’. Nvidia’s Turing GPU architecture
– named for computing pioneer Alan Turing – introduced a computer architecture that makes artificial intelligence a central method of computation, Huang said. Huang explained that this new
system is already enabling researchers to simulate 300 million atoms for 100,000 nanoseconds, a scale 10 millionfold larger than what was possible just 15 years ago. Amid a global pandemic, bringing genomics and computing breakthroughs together is more important than ever, Huang explained. ‘The pandemic has made the need
to accelerate healthcare a paramount social and economic imperative; we need these two superpowers together now.’
growth in the amount of data, particularly
healthcare data that is being
collected due to the pandemic “
Nvidia’s UK partners will be
able to put the technologies powering Cambridge-1 to work with extraordinary speed. Cambridge-1 took just 20 weeks to build, rather than the two years it takes to build most supercomputers of its scale. ‘From inception it was clear that Cambridge-1 was a pioneering deployment that would reimagine how quickly supercomputers can be designed and brought online,’ said Lee Myall, CEO of Kao Data, Nvidia’s co- location partner for Cambridge-1. Cambridge-1 is ranked the 12th
fastest in Europe and among the 50 fastest in the world, according to the latest TOP500 list of world’s fastest computers. It delivers more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and eight petaflops of Linpack performance. Based on the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD
reference architecture, the system packs 80 Nvidia DGX A100 systems,
www.scientific-computing.com
We’ve seen an exponential
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